Current Affairs

The sun rose and the ragas began. After dancing all night to edgy cascades of electronica, a few happy souls sat at daybreak on the edge of Oregon’s Coastal Range. A classical Indian singer’s pure voice rang out.

“I was looking out at this beautiful fog that rolls in around sunrise at that time of year. The fog was lifting, and the sun was showing through,” recalls Elliot Rasenick, founder and organizer of the Beloved Sacred Art & Music Festival (August 9-13, 2012). “We were watching people melt at that rare and precious moment.”

In the one month a year when the rains cease, at the unexpected intersection of underground dancefloors and spiritual exploration, Beloved brings together the gutsy, the sensual, and the glorious for a weekend of relaxation, celebration, and vibrant community. For Beloved’s organizers, it’s all one: A cutting-edge bass music producer, a cathartic gospel number, a great yoga class, a free-spirited group improvisation, a delicious meal can all point the way to the spirit.

This year’s musical offerings include the stirring Garifuna songs of Aurelio Martinez, a critics’ favorite who channels the powerful mix of indigenous, African, and European traditions his shipwrecked former slave ancestors created in Central America. Dancefloor shamans Lulacruza turn organic sounds from their Latin heritage and their worldly training at Berklee into spirit-filled songs and evocative soundscapes.

But Beloved pushes beyond mere listening. Festival darling Matt Butler, the force behind Everyone Orchestra, uses the drama and rigor of conducting to harness the intensity of the cream of the jam, rock, and world pop scenes—and to bring the audience fully into the show as music makers. David Stringer has won an international following for his compelling leadership of kirtan chanting sessions, where Stringer uses ancient roots, call and response, and Sanskrit sounds to draw participants into states of reflection and bliss.

Along with participatory performances, the Festival’s extensive educational programming offers fans a chance to explore a wide range of approaches to spiritual practice and self-care. Mythic storytelling and healing rituals, yoga sessions and massage workshops—along with jubilant participatory musical performances and all-night dancing—turn the Festival from mere event to true experience. It’s a spa-meets-sounds party in the country’s most gorgeous coastal woods.

Along with prominent artists and engaging teachers, festival goers might catch a champion throatsinger, African hand drummer, and an ecstatic crowd making spontaneous music together offstage. Or they might see Gnawan performer Hassan Hakmoun wrapped in Peruvian wool against the pleasant Oregon chill, or underground DJs entranced by Sufi devotional music.

This makes perfect sense to Rasenick: “We like to play with cultural collision and make it fun.”

The Portland-based promoter got the idea for Beloved when he realized the audiences at the electronica events and kirtans (yoga-related chanting sessions popular in India) he organized had a great deal in common. “There were these two different audiences, doing same thing and wanting the same thing,” explains Rasenick. “The two communities had a lot to learn from one another, but never got together.“

Rasenick resolved to remedy that, and launched an open-air festival. Unlike many festivals, Beloved has only one stage, increasing the focus and encouraging people of different tastes, backgrounds, and faiths to listen intently to one another.

“Most music festivals keep you flitting from place to place, which can be pleasant,” Rasenick notes. “We want to help participants learn to fully engage every single moment.”

The single-stage focus leads to deep dialogue between festival fans and musicians, between people from radically divergent backgrounds, between the natural and sonic environment. The festival site, a valley two hours from Portland, is a headliner in and of itself: Though usually rain soaked most of the year, in August the valley near Tidewater, Oregon is remarkably clear. The site demands respect, and the festival strives to minimize its ecological impact, from offering free (non-bottled) water to selecting food and art vendors based on their green commitment.

In the lush wooded setting, people begin to open up, embracing new music and new spiritual ideas. Rasenick hears regularly from overjoyed performers and from festival goers who have found new insights, be they dance music fans who learned to love 1000-year-old sounds or skeptics who found spiritual healing in the ecumenical atmosphere of the festival.

“At that time, in that place, it’s the most beautiful moment of one of the most beautiful places on planet,” muses Rasenick. “It lets us create own little universe.”

“I don't like DJ sets,” exclaims Nicola Gruev, a.k.a. Kottarashky, the Balkan beatologist who made a name for himself with pared-down, eclectic tracks built from folksy samples of everything from Bulgarian traditional singing to overblown flute and whirling clarinet.

Now, joined by a live crew of old friends and stellar Sofia musicians, The Rain Dogs, Gruev and company bring a new, crackling energy to Kottarashky’s ethno-mashups and rough-edged romps on Demoni.It’s as if a gritty house band at a tiny blues bar somewhere in Chicago suddenly became possessed by wild sonic spirits from the Bulgarian mountainside. It’s as if Tom Waits (the inspiration for the band’s curious name) or the Black Keys decided to jam with a village wedding band and a bright voiced chorus of East European grandmas.

“Working with other musicians is sometimes hard but also joyful,” Gruev reflects. “I did a lot of things for a first time, like recording and mixing live instruments in a studio. But my music became richer with the guys’ ideas and feelings. So it was a natural process, a step in the first direction.”

{full story below}

“I'm from a different generation from many other electronic DJs, and I have a different musical background,” explains Bulgaria-born Gruev. An architect by training and trade, Kottarashky found himself assembling sonic bits and pieces to create electronic tracks that felt like soundscapes, like nighttime rambles through Sofia, on his wildly successful album, OpaHey!.

But the purely electronic approach was never completely satisfying. Gruev began talking to longtime friend (and fellow architect), guitarist and keyboardist Hristos Hadziganchev, who had played in a few alt-rock bands.

The two started playing together, gradually recruiting clarinetist Aleksandar Dobrev after catching him live several times. Dobrev brought along bassist Yordan Geshakov, a widely respected bassist on the Sofia scene. After Atanas Popov joined on drums, The Rain Dogs dove into taking Kottarashky’s sound live, with a soul-inflected, gritty dynamism.

A live band felt like a natural progression for Gruev: “I like to hear live vibrations in the music,” he explains, “which was always the inspiration for my samples.”

Though no stranger to grabbing the right sound from a recording, Kottarashky gathers many of his samples himself, traveling around Bulgaria to grab the intricate yet raw voices of elder singers (the bittersweet vocal curlicues on “Slavyanka Blues”), or shimmering flute melodies (“Begemot”). They still form the backbone of many of Kottarashky and The Rain Dog’s tracks.

Yet the resulting sound feels organic, with vintage overtones and hip grooves, falling somewhere between the Mediterranean electro-mania of Balkan Beat Box and the downhome roots of the Deep South or East Bloc. “Demoni” sways between jazzy tango feel and a drum-and-bass vibe, with mysterious mumbling voices and quirky accordion flourishes (--and a delightfully gleeful video by animator Theodore Ushev). “Put a Blessing On” features the gorgeous, soulful voice of wildly creative Franco-Kiwi singer Tui Mamaki, who fell in love with Bulgaria while working on the album with The Rain Dogs. “Pancho Says” leaps between Romani delights, rumbling guitar, and an almost Afrobeat rhythm.

That, like the transition to a live band, feels utterly natural to musically omnivorous Gruev. “Everything inspires me. There is no style constraints, “he reflects. “What we trying to do is modern music: a bit romantic, a bit melancholic, powerful and rhythmic.”

The poetry of Palestine, the melodies of Lebanon. Uniting across national, ethnic and religious lines, resounding above the din of bitter politics, rockets, poverty. Singing instead of the shade of grapevines, the bright eyes of loved ones, the heartache of divisions and decline that could be healed, love that could be returned.

Marcel Khalifé, Lebanese master of the oud (lute), evokes this world, honoring the spirit of his late friend and collaborator Mahmoud Darwish, a strikingly original poet born in Galilee. Khalifé’s oud trembles, rumbles, sighs, and resonates beyond cultural specificities. Too often compared to Bob Dylan because of his firm counter-mainstream stance, Khalifé’s work can shift between the sweet melodic sensibility of Cole Porter and the gravitas of the best of Western chamber music, between the heady daring of jazz experimenters and rock defiance.

Now, as protesters rally in the streets across the Middle East, they sing his songs. Khalifé has come out as an ardent supporter of the Arab Spring. “I sang for them,” Khalifé explained in a recent statement protesting government crackdowns on protesters in Tunisia, Bahrain, Egypt, Syria and across the Arab world, “and they gave me the feeling that they were my kin, that they were the source of strength to bring about the impossible.”

Khalifé has translated his profound sense of kinship with his fellow Arabs and with humanity writ large into stirring, eloquent music on Fall of the Moon. Revisiting some of his earliest engagement with the words of the late exiled and revered Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, Khalifé once again turns personal loss, alienation, and love into a universal, soulful call.

“On the stage, I’m in my natural milieu, saying what I want,” Khalifé states. “There’s no censorship of what I say.”

{full story below}

It began with a young man, confined by war and persecution to his home in Lebanon, awestruck by the raw, eloquent words of a Palestinian poet. He picked up his oud and restlessly plucked out pieces that would go on to shake the Arab world.

The connection to Darwish began the first moment Khalifé opened one of his early books of poems. Over three decades, it evolved into a bosom collaboration that was more than the sum of its parts. “Our respective corpora have grown to be reminiscent of each other, so that the name of each of the twain, instantly and without reflection, would evoke the name of the other,” Khalifé reflects. “Even before we got to know each other personally, I felt as though Darwish’s poetry, with its divine assertiveness and prophetic cadences, had been revealed to me and for me.”

The feeling was mutual: Darwish often referred to Khalifé as his “heart’s artistic twin.” Though from different countries and religious backgrounds, both artists shared a sense of desperation about the state of their homelands and the world. From the beginning of his musical life, Khalifé has sought to restore the neglected beauty and adventuresome roots of Arab musical culture, founding a groundbreaking ensemble in his home village, teaching a new generation of musicians, and composing pieces that redefine the music of the region.

Khalifé takes traditions and transforms them according to new, yet deeply appropriate rules: While the text dictates the tenor and shape of his pieces, the music retains an edge of the avant garde. In the free-flowing bittersweet sweep of pieces like “In Exile,” pensive vocals intertwine with hints of jazz ballads and classical lieder, mirroring the haunting journey of Darwish’s words through sorrow, reflection, and joy despite mortality: “And tell absence: You lack me/ yet I am present…to make you whole.”

Both Darwish and Khalifé sought elevation through technical mastery and passionate honesty beyond the morass of politics, into the realm of the human, the vitally connected. Darwish’s complicated life of activism, exile, imprisonment, and marginalization did not prevent him from producing stunning poems that chronicled his travails with a freshness and precision similar to Khalifé’s musical approaches.

“Marcel eliminated the gap created by the poets between poem and song. He restored to exiled emotion its rescuing power to reconcile poetry, which glorified its distance from people and was thus abandoned by them,” Darwish explained in a statement before his passing in 2008. “Poetry, therefore, developed the song of Marcel Khalifé, while Khalifé's song mended the relationship of poetry with people. With this, the people on the street started to sing, and lyrics need not a podium, as bread need not announce itself to the hungry.”

Together, these two iconic figures of contemporary Arab art and culture achieved one of Khalifé’s life-long goals: to give voice to the voiceless. His art has won him recognition from UNESCO, who declared Khalifé an Artist for Peace in 2005. It has been featured on the world’s most prestigious stages and in major feature films like 2007’s Rendition. In a newly awakened Middle East, Khalifé’s works continue to inspire and transform, reminding singers and listeners of their innate humanity and dignity.

“Music is my oxygen,” Khalifé told Democracy Now host Amy Goodman in an interview. “Without it, I feel life is lacking something. I wish that these politicians who control the world would listen to a tune before they go to bed. Perhaps then, instead of declaring war, they would declare love.”

The blues has long been about storytelling, about raising a voice from the margins and edges of American life. As it spread from the Deep South to Chicago and beyond, the blues incorporated a powerful musical groove which has influenced music around the world. Now, musicians are reaching across the Atlantic and finding that they have a common story to tell in shades of blue.

Putumayo’s African Blues chronicles the return of the blues to its African motherland. It also demonstrates the burgeoning connections between West and East African musicians and performers from the blues’ traditional heartland in the U.S., as well as converts in Europe—and shows how these connections are revolutionizing traditions on both continents.

Taj Mahal, together with the Culture Musical Club of Zanzibar, gets down and deep in a slow-burning meditation on the beauties of Dhow Countries. Mali’s Issa Babayogo brings his characteristic, sparkling knack for gritty, melodic grooves. The ever-evolving Playing for Change band—this time featuring hip desert rockers Tinariwen and Keb Mo—reveals how globally malleable a good old 12-bar blues can be. And as always, the collection is filled with engaging new discoveries like hard-hitting Tuareg singer-songwriter Amar Sundy, unfolding and grooving collaborations like the Belgian-Malian project Kalaban Coura and the unexpected blend of Mali Latino.

“It’s like two halves of a circle,” muses Putumayo head Dan Storper, a passionate collector of music from around the world. “The blues’ roots are in Africa but emerged and evolved as a powerful musical style in America. Now they’re reuniting in new and exciting ways.”

{full story below}

“When we worked on Mali to Memphis, we recognized the powerful connection between the bluesy music of West Africa and the Mississippi Delta,” explains Dan “That began my search for American and African blues and blues-influenced music and led to a series of successful CDs including Mississippi Blues, American Blues and Blues Around the World.”

Storper, a blues fan who lives in New Orleans and his staff found a growing number of collaborative projects based on close musical friendships British guitarist Ramon Goose teamed up with kora (West African bridge-harp) whiz Diabel Cissokho (“Totoumo”), while respected Latin keyboard player and producer Alex Wilson found the sweet spot where Afro-Latin beats and roaring organ lines jive with kora, percussion, and other sounds from West Africa (Mali Latino’s “Ni Koh Bedy”).

As the various currents of blues have flowed back together—the developments in the U.S. and Europe, and African musicians’ responses to the American blues records that arrived midcentury—a new depth and richness have come to this storied musical form.

“It’s natural since the collaborations between Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba, George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo,” reflects Storper. “There’s something magical when two musical cultures collide and bring the best of each world to a song.”

Around a crackling bonfire in a remote village, the war finally ended.

Seven years since the last bullet was fired, a decade of fighting in Sierra Leone found resolution as people stood and spoke. Some had perpetrated terrible crimes against former friends. Some had faced horrible losses: loved ones murdered, limbs severed. But as they told their stories, admitted their wrongs, forgave, danced, and sang together, true reconciliation began.

This is the story of “Fambul Tok” (Krio for “family talk”), and the world is hearing it because of Catalyst for Peace. Catalyst, a U.S.-based international collaboratory, seeks out and supports grassroots peacebuilding that springs from local practices and culture: from the songs and tales, from the town meetings and ceremonies, from the liberating truth-telling, apology and forgiveness that end bloodshed, enmity, and endless cycles of bitterness.

Now, Catalyst is celebrating these breakthrough moments, and the creative spirit that can accomplish the seemingly impossible. This spirit dwells in music: Wan Fambul/One Family unites the diverse voices of artists from conflict zones. The result is a high-energy, urgent call for forgiveness and deep dialogue from edgy DJs and soulful singer-songwriters, from hard-hitting reggae outfits to transnational pop explorers. The groove-powered compilation features tracks by global music heavyweights Vieux Farka Toure, Idan Raichel, Vusi Mahlasela, and Dengue Fever.

“The lessons we are learning from Sierra Leone are universal lessons,” explains Libby Hoffman, founder and president of Catalyst for Peace. “The processes are applicable in other places and settings. What people in Sierra Leone are illustrating, artists in other communities—like the ones on Wan Fambul—are capturing and expressing in their own meaningful ways.”

Wan Fambul serves as a sonic companion and counterpoint to Catalyst’s Fambul Tok (see FambulTok.com), a stirring documentary film and book on the groundbreaking work of Fambul Tok in Sierra Leone that brings former adversaries, perpetrators, and victims together for community discussions in a traditional setting.

Fambul Tok will have its world television premiere February 22nd on EPIX cable channel (see EpixHD.com, FambulTok.com or your cable listing for details).

The benefit album will be available for a donation at FambulTok.com. All proceeds will go directly to support the grassroots peacebuilding work of Fambul Tok in Sierra Leone.

{full story below}

“We believe that music is the fastest way to pass the message,” exclaims Sierra Leonean pop icon Bajah whose two tracks with his Dry Eye Crew (“We Na Wan Fambul,” “Gun Thing”) emit an upbeat optimism in service of preventing election violence. “Music can go where you can’t go. Music is circulating and it can be in more than one place, and that’s the power that we’ve got as musicians. The power to preach positive music, to give voice to the voiceless.”

Hoffman, like Bajah, has been working to do just that for nearly ten years. A former academic, Hoffman longed to tell the world about the bold yet unsung community-based peacebuilding efforts she had seen across the world, and particularly in some of the most tragic conflict zones in Africa, and to help these efforts grow in strategic impact. She eventually teamed up with visionary Sierra Leonean human rights activist John Caulker, who had an unprecedented plan to bring people together at the most intimate level, using long-held traditional meetings, ceremonies, dances, and musical practices to foster spaces for forgiveness. The forgiveness that seemed to elude communities, despite national efforts, courts, and truth commissions organized to deal with the aftermath of a brutal civil war. Through their collaboration, Fambul Tok came into being and quickly began holding community meetings.

Hoffman was astonished when she witnessed her first ceremony early on in the Fambul Tok program. In a tiny village in the Sierra Leonean hinterlands, people gathered around a fire in the center of a dusty circle. “No one knew what was going to happen, who was going to come forward,” Hoffman remembers. “A man stood up who only had one arm and told his story of how a rebel soldier had cut it off. The chief said, ‘Do you see the person who amputated it?’ He did, and the other man stepped forward and apologized. They hugged, and the man forgave him. At first I thought, ‘They must be dramatizing it.’ But as this happened again and again, I realized that people were not acting. This was in fact the first time they’d ever talked about what had happened to them. Not only were they telling their stories fully and truthfully, they were forgiving. Someone would admit and apologize, and their victim would openly forgive them.”

Forgiveness and a new sense of unity in a fractured community are forces the artists on Wan Fambul all hope to channel. “Most conflicts are based on a lack of understanding and communication,” explains the globally-inflected Iranian pop duo Abjeez. “Music creates unanimity. No matter what religious or political view we might have, music resonates in the very same way in our bodies.”

And forgiveness has a power that defies high-level politics, the talks and treaties that too often seem unable to bring about peace alone. As Israeli Idan Raichel, who collaborates with Malian blues innovator Vieux Farke Toure on “Say God,” notes, “Peace will not be reached by signing a peace treaty between our great leaders and their great leaders. Ultimately, it will be achieved through knowing people from other countries as neighbors–because a neighbor is not your enemy.”

“All these musicians reveal the creative power that can’t be squelched, the same power that we encountered in Sierra Leonean villages. Decades of war and poverty and systematic disenfranchisement can’t kill it,” Hoffman says. “The artists on Wan Fambul are expressing the same reality: making music affirms the creative force that is the basis of what heals and unites us.”

Beats fly from drums made of the living roots of towering trees, or from the surface of flowing water. Songs, born of highly complex structures, spring from multi-part improvisation. Rhythmic cycles extend to lengths that baffle outsiders’ ears. Music both expresses and creates the moment, with spontaneous compositions leaping out in joy, or contemplative flute melodies drifting through the late night village to encourage dreams and peace.

This is the music of the Bayaka (Pygmies) and the Oka! Soundtrack. Directed by Lavinia Currier (Passion in the Desert) and starring Kris Marshall (Love, Actually), the film tells the story of ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno, a leading expert on Bayaka music who ignored a life-threatening disease to live for three decades among these forest hunter-gatherers and record their music. Filmed and recorded on location in the remote tropical forests of the Central African Republic, Oka!’s story, the film, and the soundtrack were intimately shaped by Bayaka artists.

Going far beyond previous recorded encounters with this unique music, musician and engineer Chris Berry used multitracking techniques generally left in the studio and brought them to the Bayaka’s home turf. He worked with the community to write songs and to harness the sonic qualities of everything from earth bows to midnight flutes, from resonant roots to cupped palms on water. The result is a crisp, lush perspective that captures the full glory of the Bayaka egalitarian spirit and endless musical creativity.

“You just can’t frame it like Western music,” Berry explains. “It’s very complex, and make no mistake: Bayaka musicians know exactly what they are doing. And the most ingenious thing about it is that while they stick to this order, everyone is free. They express that moment and get at the power and beauty of where you are, right there.”

In just such a moment, Essandje, a highly respected woman in the community, leaped into overdubs. At first, the Bayaka singers weren’t quite sure why they had to follow Berry’s suggestion, put on headphones, and sing over their previously recorded tracks in the thatched shelter Berry used as his base.

But Essandje got it (Her nimble, rich voice rings out on “Mua” and “Wild Yam”). And within days, so did everyone else, with her guidance. “When Essandje broke the barrier, that’s when the magic started happening,” Berry recalls with a smile. “After a few days, the women came to me and said, ‘We want to write songs, and we want to do to it with you.’”

“The women are the stars of Bayaka music, “Berry says, “When the women start to sing, the men shut up.” Many Bayaka songs come to them in dreams. Etoo (“Yetoo’s Dream”) asked Chris to record the songs she had dreamed in the forest. “‘One day,’ she said, ‘I dreamed a song. When I woke up singing it, my husband was singing the same song,’” Oka! director Lavinia Currier recalls.

Berry’s recording rig was designed to make breaking barriers easy. He had honed it as part of a collaborative effort with globally minded composer Paul Winter, who had invited Berry to join in on a project chronicling the music found along birds’ migration routes. Berry, an American-born multi-instrumentalist who spent more than a decade in Zimbabwe studying the mbira (thumb piano), had recorded thousands of hours of African music, multitracking in the field instead of simply hanging a mic or two over musicians or grabbing a few catchy samples.

Bayaka sounds presented a particularly fascinating challenge: “A lot of the other African music I recorded had lots of rules and stable, regulated roles for the musicians and parts,” Berry explains. “But with the Bayaka, everyone gets to improvise if they stay within certain loose parameters. The music reflects their society, because no one is leader and no one is follower. They all play together, with four or more intermingling songlines. It’s like trying to record Mingus, Coltrane, Miles, and Dizzy, all soloing at the same time, yet all playing together perfectly” on tracks like the bawdy, intricate “Bottlefunk Girls.”

This complexity and freedom first gripped Sarno as he headed into the forest, and astounded Berry as he worked and played music with the Bayaka. Compositions feature rhythmic cycles that feel extremely long by Western standards: “We have a 12-bar blues,” Berry notes. “Just imagine a 54-bar blues, or a 67-bar blues, and you’re getting close to the Bayaka.”

Music is a constant activity, but not really a subject of intellectual discussion for the Bayaka. For the Bayaka, a person’s personality is expressed in song and dance. Berry had to spend time with them, dancing and singing (two concepts expressed by a single word, “eboka” in Bayaka language), improvising and listening. In addition to striking songs, he heard an elder playing flute as he strolled past sleepers late at night (“Mboyo Flute”) and the subtle resonance of the earth bow (“Molimo”). “The earth bow may be the oldest instrument on earth,” explains film director Currier, who like Berry, worked intensively with the Bayaka musicians. “A length of twine is stretched from a bent sapling and anchored in the ground where there is a hollow resonance, then plucked like a double bass.”

Jubilant Bayakas returning from trading at a nearby village played the tree drum, a living forest trees whose roots boom below ground (“Tree Drum and Gano”). “The Gano is a storytelling song, related to the Bantu “Griot” tradition, and, distantly, to American blues,” Currier notes. “Many Gano songs tell of the Bayaka’s ancestors, when people were related to and spoke to the animals, to chimpanzees and gorillas.”

As he worked closely with the Bayaka, Berry was allowed to record a purely female activity, waterdrumming, when Bayaka women cup their palms to create bubbles of air that can be tuned and played with a marimba-like resonance (“Waterdrum”). The women performers, who usually make this music while bathing, agreed to dive in clothed while Berry risked several mics to capture the full, splashing effect.

Yet Berry also wanted to pass along more than just the sounds of his newfound collaborators; he wanted listeners and film viewers to get closer to the visceral experience of being there with musicmaking Bayaka. Berry thoughtfully added bass lines, percussion, and additional frequencies so that the recording would transmit the full feel of the performances, from the rumble of roots to the quiet bounce of the earth bow. He also knew he was creating sound to go with the film’s narrative of intense emotional journey and cross-cultural encounter.

“Making a soundtrack with musicians like the Bayaka is a translation process. If you don’t translate it, many listeners won’t get it. Yet most projects get over-translated,” Berry muses. “It’s easy to misunderstand music that’s so complex, that comes from a very different kind of community from our own. I hope this scoring approach becomes more of a trend when we’re dealing with other cultures; there’s a lot of mutual learning and growth to be had if we let others speak. If we let their voices come through.”

Beats fly from drums made of the living roots of towering trees, or from the surface of flowing water. Songs, born of highly complex structures, spring from multi-part improvisation. Rhythmic cycles extend to lengths that baffle outsiders’ ears. Music both expresses and creates the moment, with spontaneous compositions leaping out in joy, or contemplative flute melodies drifting through the late night village to encourage dreams and peace.

This is the music of the Bayaka (Pygmies) and the Oka! Soundtrack (Oka Productions; release: February 1, 2012). Directed by Lavinia Currier (Passion in the Desert) and starring Kris Marshall (Love, Actually), the film tells the story of ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno, a leading expert on Bayaka music who ignored a life-threatening disease to live for three decades among these forest hunter-gatherers and record their music. Filmed and recorded on location in the remote tropical forests of the Central African Republic, Oka!’s story, the film, and the soundtrack were intimately shaped by Bayaka artists.

Going far beyond previous recorded encounters with this unique music, musician and engineer Chris Berry used multitracking techniques generally left in the studio and brought them to the Bayaka’s home turf. He worked with the community to write songs and to harness the sonic qualities of everything from earth bows to midnight flutes, from resonant roots to cupped palms on water. The result is a crisp, lush perspective that captures the full glory of the Bayaka egalitarian spirit and endless musical creativity.

“You just can’t frame it like Western music,” Berry explains. “It’s very complex, and make no mistake: Bayaka musicians know exactly what they are doing. And the most ingenious thing about it is that while they stick to this order, everyone is free. They express that moment and get at the power and beauty of where you are, right there.”

In just such a moment, Essandje, a highly respected woman in the community, leaped into overdubs. At first, the Bayaka singers weren’t quite sure why they had to follow Berry’s suggestion, put on headphones, and sing over their previously recorded tracks in the thatched shelter Berry used as his base.

But Essandje got it (Her nimble, rich voice rings out on “Mua” and “Wild Yam”). And within days, so did everyone else, with her guidance. “When Essandje broke the barrier, that’s when the magic started happening,” Berry recalls with a smile. “After a few days, the women came to me and said, ‘We want to write songs, and we want to do to it with you.’”

“The women are the stars of Bayaka music, “Berry says, “When the women start to sing, the men shut up.” Many Bayaka songs come to them in dreams. Etoo (“Yetoo’s Dream”) asked Chris to record the songs she had dreamed in the forest. “‘One day,’ she said, ‘I dreamed a song. When I woke up singing it, my husband was singing the same song,’” Oka! director Lavinia Currier recalls.

Berry’s recording rig was designed to make breaking barriers easy. He had honed it as part of a collaborative effort with globally minded composer Paul Winter, who had invited Berry to join in on a project chronicling the music found along birds’ migration routes. Berry, an American-born multi-instrumentalist who spent more than a decade in Zimbabwe studying the mbira (thumb piano), had recorded thousands of hours of African music, multitracking in the field instead of simply hanging a mic or two over musicians or grabbing a few catchy samples.

Bayaka sounds presented a particularly fascinating challenge: “A lot of the other African music I recorded had lots of rules and stable, regulated roles for the musicians and parts,” Berry explains. “But with the Bayaka, everyone gets to improvise if they stay within certain loose parameters. The music reflects their society, because no one is leader and no one is follower. They all play together, with four or more intermingling songlines. It’s like trying to record Mingus, Coltrane, Miles, and Dizzy, all soloing at the same time, yet all playing together perfectly” on tracks like the bawdy, intricate “Bottlefunk Girls.”

This complexity and freedom first gripped Sarno as he headed into the forest, and astounded Berry as he worked and played music with the Bayaka. Compositions feature rhythmic cycles that feel extremely long by Western standards: “We have a 12-bar blues,” Berry notes. “Just imagine a 54-bar blues, or a 67-bar blues, and you’re getting close to the Bayaka.”

Music is a constant activity, but not really a subject of intellectual discussion for the Bayaka. For the Bayaka, a person’s personality is expressed in song and dance. Berry had to spend time with them, dancing and singing (two concepts expressed by a single word, “eboka” in Bayaka language), improvising and listening. In addition to striking songs, he heard an elder playing flute as he strolled past sleepers late at night (“Mboyo Flute”) and the subtle resonance of the earth bow (“Molimo”). “The earth bow may be the oldest instrument on earth,” explains film director Currier, who like Berry, worked intensively with the Bayaka musicians. “A length of twine is stretched from a bent sapling and anchored in the ground where there is a hollow resonance, then plucked like a double bass.”

Jubilant Bayakas returning from trading at a nearby village played the tree drum, a living forest trees whose roots boom below ground (“Tree Drum and Gano”). “The Gano is a storytelling song, related to the Bantu “Griot” tradition, and, distantly, to American blues,” Currier notes. “Many Gano songs tell of the Bayaka’s ancestors, when people were related to and spoke to the animals, to chimpanzees and gorillas.”

As he worked closely with the Bayaka, Berry was allowed to record a purely female activity, waterdrumming, when Bayaka women cup their palms to create bubbles of air that can be tuned and played with a marimba-like resonance (“Waterdrum”). The women performers, who usually make this music while bathing, agreed to dive in clothed while Berry risked several mics to capture the full, splashing effect.

Yet Berry also wanted to pass along more than just the sounds of his newfound collaborators; he wanted listeners and film viewers to get closer to the visceral experience of being there with musicmaking Bayaka. Berry thoughtfully added bass lines, percussion, and additional frequencies so that the recording would transmit the full feel of the performances, from the rumble of roots to the quiet bounce of the earth bow. He also knew he was creating sound to go with the film’s narrative of intense emotional journey and cross-cultural encounter.

“Making a soundtrack with musicians like the Bayaka is a translation process. If you don’t translate it, many listeners won’t get it. Yet most projects get over-translated,” Berry muses. “It’s easy to misunderstand music that’s so complex, that comes from a very different kind of community from our own. I hope this scoring approach becomes more of a trend when we’re dealing with other cultures; there’s a lot of mutual learning and growth to be had if we let others speak. If we let their voices come through.”

Whether continuing famous musical lineages or pushing forward on new paths, the artists of globalFEST (January 8, 2012 at New York City’s Webster Hall; full info at globalfest.org) show how world music has matured from a quaint, catch-all niche to a meaningful, deeply rooted challenge to the musical status quo. Artists are crafting history into new sounds.

This year’s edition of the annual world music showcase and all-night party includes three U.S. debuts, as well as several fresh programs and approaches from a bevy of respected global performers.

The Silk Road Ensemble: An international collective of virtuoso musicians from around the globe, this ensemble carries on the cross-cultural legacy of founder and artistic director Yo-Yo Ma, drawing inspiration from the historical Silk Road and contemporary musical crossroads.

Though many of this edition’s artists have taken up the torch from family members or musical mentors, they are reaching into new sonic territory, whether they are funkifying cumbia or transforming the role of the spike fiddle or jaw harp. globalFEST, as America’s vital world music springboard event coinciding with the annual Arts Presenters Conference (APAP), aims to bring musicians to ears and even into venues once closed to global artists.

“In addition to summer rock and folk music festivals, we’ve started to see an embracing of world music throughout the performing arts field, including more traditionally classical venues,” explains festival co-organizer Bill Bragin (Acidophilus: Live and Active Cultures). “Many of this year’s globalFEST artists are performers who would be appropriate in more traditional concert halls, which are responding to the desire to diversify their programs.”

The goal of access has been at the heart of the festival’s mission since it was founded post-9/11, when dedicated global music presenters looked to restart the stalled influx of international music at a crucial moment. globalFEST remains committed to supporting exchange—both cultural and economic—and has emphasized artists of note from Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, and from Haiti since the earthquake that struck there in 2010.

“globalFEST needs to constantly be aware of its mission,” continues co-organizer Isabel Soffer (Live Sounds). “We spotlight artists we believe presenters will want to book, will be successful in their venues and will bring new audiences. Our curatorial decisions are made with this in mind, and in this way, we feel we can encourage presenters to rethink artists that are on tour.”

2012’s festival promises to indeed be great, filling the multiple, varied performance spaces at Webster Hall with irresistible dance sounds, reflective beauty, and singer-songwriter intensity. globalFEST’s emphasis on access—access to the U.S. market for innovative musicians, continued access to new global music for music fans through reasonable ticket prices supported via globalFEST’s Kickstarter campaign—now extends beyond good times in the early January cultural doldrums.

With support from the Ford Foundation, the globalFEST Touring Fund is launching to support festival alums on U.S. tours, as well as creating a new program to reimburse festival performers for expenses related to their globalFEST appearances. This, added to ongoing support from founding sponsor, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, will strengthen the festival’s ability to find uncommonly good, often unheard sounds and bring them to the States.

“Starting this edition, we will be able to offset some of our artists’ expenses, the cost of coming to New York to play a showcase festival,” notes globalFEST co-organizer Shanta Thake (Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater). “It will encourage musicians and expand the pool of artists who can commit to that investment. We are excited about the possibilities these new programs will create to widen globalFEST’s geographical and musical scope.”

“Global citizenry is a priority for France, and for many people worldwide. We support globalFEST in hopes of sharing the multicultural musical heritages of France-based, France-produced and Francophone artists," says Emmanuel Morlet, Director of the Music Office of the French Embassy, the festival’s founding sponsor since its first edition. “From increasing cultural understanding to the real economic role the festival plays for emerging performers, now more than ever globalFEST plays a great role in connecting people across political boundaries.” And gets them dancing while doing it.

globalFEST, Inc. is a not-for-profit production presented in association with Live Sounds, Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater, Acidophilus: Live & Active Cultures and The Bowery Presents. Support provided by The Ford Foundation and The Cultural Services of the French Embassy with additional support from the French Music Export Office, recognizing France’s pre-eminent role as a hotbed of global music activity. The globalFEST media sponsors are WNYC Radio and NPR.org. Artist visa services are provided courtesy of Tamizdat. Publicity services are provided by rock paper scissors, inc.

In every dazzling palace and every shadowy alley hums a barely palpable but evocative drone. It’s the ache of glory days now gone, a stirring melancholy that ennobles and embroils the City, once at the heart of so much.

This is the sound and pulse of Constantinople/Istanbul, and Boston-based musicians’ collective DÜNYA, with Schola Cantorum and Ensemble Trinitas, brings it to the forefront on A Story of the City...Constantinople, Istanbul, their journey through a thousand years of the music that echoed along the Bosphorus. The double CD is currently submitted for a Grammy™ award.

“I think that the rich diversity reflected in this album will be appreciated by Americans,” reflects Mehmet Ali Sanlikol, musical director and co-founder of DÜNYA. “Through that appreciation, I am sure the American view of the Near and Middle East will change. The Grammies are a great platform for our work to find a greater voice, and to highlight DÜNYA’s unique structure and many talents.”

***

DÜNYA sprang from frustrating success. Sanlikol, who came to the U.S. to study both at Berklee and the New England Conservatory, had won a name for himself on the jazz circuit, playing festivals across Eurasia and collaborating with legends like trombone icon Bob Brookmeyer. And yet he longed for something very different.

Then one night a decade ago, he played a game of Risk. A friend wanted to provide a fitting soundtrack for world domination and included a few tracks that struck Sanlikol like a bolt from the blue. It was music many believed to have been played by the Janissaries. Sanlikol couldn’t get it out of his head.

“It wasn’t about ideology or nationalist feelings of any kind. It wasn’t because I missed Turkey, though the distance helped make the discovery genuine,” Sanlikol recalls. “It was totally an accident and completely about the music. I listened like never before, and it rocked like Zeppelin. And though I had all this theoretical training and sophistication, I just couldn’t find the tonic.”

Seriously intrigued, Sanlikol began to study Turkish music with the same dedication he had pursued his Western classical and jazz training (he is now a leading scholar on Mehter or the so-called Janissary music, as well as a professor at Brown and the New England Conservatory) He found himself taken by the entire region and took lessons in, among other traditions, Greek Orthodox chanting (from Nektarios Antoniou, leader of Schola Cantorum and DÜNYA member). He soon discovered dozens of other kindred spirits around Boston, high-powered musicians who loved Middle Eastern, Sephardic, Greek, or other Eastern Mediterranean sounds.

Sanlikol, working together with close friends Robert Labaree and Antoniou, suddenly understood: An ensemble flexible enough to cross cultures and play across musical genres, yet broad enough to embrace all the local talent, would have to take a somewhat unconventional form.

DÜNYA was born, a true collective made up of interlocking ensembles—playing everything from New Music to Anatolian folk—and concentric rings of participants circling a highly committed core. It felt like the ideal response to the unsatisfying life of a touring musician, always performing the same repertoire night after night. “With this structure, we can find a fresh kind of continuity,” reflects Sanlikol. “We can come together as friends and keep playing together over and over at radically different concerts.”

Several years ago, contemplating DÜNYA’s next concert, Sanlikol toyed with the idea of a program of songs about Istanbul, of putting together a nice, light evening of pop music. Then he got in way too deep, finding music that extended back in time, and into a plethora of cultures and faiths. “I realized, ‘Wow, I’m getting sucked into this thing. What do I do?’” Sanlikol remembers with a smile. “That’s when [Nobel laureate] Orhan Pamuk’s novel about Istanbul came out. He has this melancholic idea about the city, and it inspired me. I listened to all these musics, even military or upbeat ones, and I couldn’t help but hear that melancholic tone. It’s all over, whether it’s Greek Constantinople or Turkish Istanbul. The great heydays are long gone.”

Yet the unexpected figures who helped fashion the city’s music live on. There’s the love-struck medieval French nobleman and crusader, Gui de Coucy (“A vous amant, plus qu’a nul autre gent”). Or the intriguing Ali Ufki (Wojciech Bobowski), who converted to Islam from Protestantism and became a musician in the Ottoman court (he wrote down instrumental pieces like “Buselik Asiran pesrev”). Or Sephardic Jewish singer Haim Efendi (“La rosa enfloresse”), whose upbeat love song is pure Istanbul folk.

And the music is still glorious, though often elusive. As Sanlikol and DÜNYA began to map out their journey, starting from Greek antiquity and ending in modern Turkey, they faced a multitude of interpretational challenges. Sanlikol had little interest in historical recreation or ethnographic preservation, and opted instead for innovative twists that evoke the spirit of a time and place.

Sanlikol’s opening original composition, “Byzantium,” places the ghostly fragments of ancient Greece’s music in a bold, 20th-century atonal frame. DÜNYA fearlessly turned traditionally vocal pieces into instrumental tunes, mixed companion instruments from different traditions, and turned to thoughtfully arranged folk melodies to complement the sometimes scanty historical record. The music leaps with surprising grace from spare Sufi chants (“Salat-i ümmiye”) to full-on, wah-wah guitar-powered pop anthems (“Felekten beter vurdu”). Artfully recorded by Grammy™-nominated engineer, John Weston (Futura Productions), the result is an epic work of co-creation, mirroring the rise, fall, and continued vibrancy of one of the world’s crucial cultural capitals.

Though willing to play with tradition, Sanlikol and DÜNYA ‘s players have developed keen sensitivities to the complex emotions that surround place, time, and identity in Sanlikol’s native region. Sanlikol experienced how complex, ambiguous, and visceral the past’s impact could be: His exiled Turkish Cypriot parents recalled singing “God Save the Queen” in Turkish and knew what conflict meant. “This isn’t feel-good musical diplomacy. There’s an edge to it; there’s tension,” Sanlikol states. “When you speak of identity as a concept in mid east, in all the nation states that came out of Ottoman Empire, it’s problematic.”

“But music is first and foremost,” adds Sanlikol. “This is not the story of this or that people, but the story of the city. That’s what makes it work.”

The heyday for Aboriginal artists is now. With centuries-old fiddle tunes unreeling beside bumping club beats, with killer flow rocking the mic beside gritty guitar blues, there’s never been more creative space for young people of First Nation/Native American, Inuit, and Métis (mixed European and First Nation) heritage. They can sing their roots, weave newfound urban communities, and dance beyond stereotypes.

Aboriginal Music Week(November 1-6, 2011) in Winnipeg, Manitoba showcases this vibrant new energy, bringing together a broad sweep of North American artists and a growing, youthful urban audience. Concerts get Elders square dancing, kids chanting along with MCs, and dance floors packed with soaring pow wow drum breaks.

“We have found that Aboriginal people want to see Aboriginal artists perform all kinds of music,” explains Alan Greyeyes, festival curator. “We produce the festival for Aboriginal people but we really want to use the festival and the music to build bridges with other communities. And it’s working.”

This year’s headliners show the diversity and range of Aboriginal music: A Tribe Called Red’s hard-hitting, pow wow-powered electro (Electric Pow Wow on November 4); Leela Gilday’s reflective folk; Derek Miller’s rootsy rock (The Saturday Night 49er on November 5); John Arcand’s generations-old, masterful Métis fiddle (Take the Fort! on November 1); Winnipeg’s Most and their fresh, wildly popular hip hop (Hip Hop Night on November 2).

“It’s an exciting time to be Aboriginal in Canada right now,” enthuses Bear Witness of the DJ collective A Tribe Called Red. “The community across Canada is coming together more and more, especially around the arts and music. There’s so much going on, so many interesting things, so many strong artists.”

***

The burst of new creative energy comes after several generations of cultural loss and stigma. “Until quite recently, there were no positive references in media or on stage to Native people, especially in urban centers like Winnipeg,” reflects Greyeyes. “The only time we were in the spotlight was for crimes. But now, kids are seeing Native people are great artists who perform and get played on the radio. They get to see themselves reflected on stage.”

This reflection has many facets. There are raw MCs from rough neighborhoods. There are young musicians picking up the jigs and reels their ancestors used to lure fur traders centuries ago. There is mestizo dub step and good ol’ country and western.

Even within genres, Aboriginal artists tend to bend the rules. Hip hop shows become family events, with preschoolers bopping on stage with their rapping fathers. An edgy club scene inspires artists to return to their roots. Community and tradition breed innovation.

“Our use of pow wow music was about getting this amazing support from the community in Ottawa. The first party we threw was packed with young Aboriginal people we didn’t know. It was a comfortable place for these urban young people to go,” Bear recalls. “We didn’t intend that, but we wanted to give back to them and create music that expressed that connection to the community. Something they could claim as their own.” The result: glittering, striking tracks that seamlessly integrate traditional songs and drums and reclaim pop culture portrayals of “Indians” via wry samples.

“I have found Aboriginal artists to be some of the most boundary-breaking, original, and refreshing artists I have ever met,” notes Gilday, whose carefully crafted songs of Aboriginal life have won her widespread respect in the folk scene. “It is an honour to be a part of a community responsible for this level of creativity, musicianship, and dedication.”

This creativity makes it easy to build bridges to mainstream acclaim. Derek Miller recently recorded a duet with Willie Nelson. A Tribe Called Red caught the ear of golden-boy producer Diplo. Winnipeg’s Most are on heavy rotation at local radio stations and kids of all backgrounds chant their lyrics in the city’s schoolyards. Aboriginal artists tour extensively and win national awards.

Connecting Aboriginal artists—from different scenes, at different points in their career—is part of the broader mission of festival producer Aboriginal Music Manitoba (www.ammb.ca). “We want to create a stronger professional infrastructure for Aboriginal performers,” says Greyeyes. The festival, along with night after night of high-calibre concerts, provides opportunities for artists to network with local community music bookers, and to create moments of contact with new, mostly young audiences.

“For such a long time, our people have been silenced, and we have had to fight to keep our traditions,” says Estella Sanchez, the spitfire mestiza MC of World Hood (November 4). “The fact that Aboriginal Music Week can bring people with similar histories from around the globe together is amazing. We have so much to share as a people, and so much to learn from each other about keeping our cultural traditions intact.”

Francesco Del Maro was ticked off: Friends in the U.S. seemed to think Italian music was all “Volare” and Verdi, mandolin melancholy and maudlin mafia soundtracks. Yet the 15 year music industry vertran did more than just get mad; he threw a party and got dozens of hip Italian musicians to L.A. for a multi-night, multi-venue blow out.

That was two years ago. Now, Hit Week (October 10-16, 2011; full ticket details at www.hitweek.it) has blossomed into a three-city festival thanks in part to support from Italian institutions, highlighting the catchiest and edgiest music Italy has to offer. On major stages and in intimate clubs in New York City, L.A., and (for the first time this year) Miami, wild-eyed Zappa devotees and electro-powered rock, sleek globally inspired jazz and dubbed-out trip hop collide for a whirlwind romp through the Italian music scene.

~~~

For Hit Week, it’s about power and savvy, not origins. “Hit Week doesn’t focus on the music that’s recognizably from Italy,” explains Del Maro. “The language isn’t important. We’re looking for music of global caliber; that’s so good, it doesn’t matter where it’s from.” This formula has worked: In its short history, Hit Week’s audiences have doubled and the festival has established a foothold in some of the toughest U.S. markets.

“There’s nothing better than seeing young Americans in their 20s shouting into their cell phones at a show about a group they’ve just seen,” remarks Del Maro, festival curator and instigator. “When you hear them rave about a band, that they can’t believe this is Italian music, it’s just amazing.”Though broadly appealing, Hit Week’s artists have a distinctly Italian spirit. Several hail from the country’s unsung musical hotspots—like the increasingly popular travel destination of Puglia—scenes few Americans are aware of.

Hit Week artists vary wildly, but they share a certain spirit. They flirt with local sounds, satirize local conditions, climb local charts, and pack local stadiums with hundreds of thousands of dedicated fans. Subsonica have scored numerous number one hits in Italy, making them the current darling of the rock scene. Caparezza sells out major arenas on a regular basis, thanks to his high-energy, always changing, innately quirky shows.

Italian artists are also quietly attracting the attention of international heavyweights, be they edgy producers or major labels. Nicola Conte just signed a deal with international jazz mainstays, Impulse. Casino Royale have teamed up with Scottish DJ Howie B (who’s worked with everyone from Tricky to U2) to trade dub breaks and licks. Rising star Erica Mou is working with Bjork’s producer, Valgeir Sigurðsson, whose shimmering electronic touches unveil new facets of Mou’s raw, personal songs.

Along side these major acts and hot newcomers, Hit Week will showcase the best of Italy’s burgeoning crop of emerging music, selected via Facebook contest, thanks to the involvement of the Italian Minister of Young Generation. Young bands get to travel to the U.S. and play for new listeners and industry heavyweights alike. “It’s been great for artists just starting out,” explains Del Maro. “Some participants from previous years went on to play various major U.S. festivals.”

Hit Week aims not only to bring creative young Italians to the U.S.; it’s reaching out to young Americans, getting them exposed to the coolest moments of the Italian scene. As part of its ongoing partnership with local universities, the festival is arranging several meet-and-greet opportunities at local colleges (UCLA, Columbia, University of Miami) that will bring together artists and audiences in a casual, intimate setting.

“Hit Week shows that Italian artists are second to none,” Del Maro says. “We are not coming from the third world of music, but have something new to tell the world.”

Hit Week is produced by Francesco Del Maro for Music Experience Roma Italy and Mela Inc. Los Angeles, with the support of The Minister of Young Generation, The Italian Federation of Music Industry, The Puglia Region, The Italian Trade Commission of Los Angeles, The Italian Ministry of Economic Development, The National Italian American Foundation, The Rhythm Foundation Miami, Gibson, Dw, Aqua Panna, Rockol, Made in Roma, Dw Drums, Paiste and more to come.

For The Afro-Semitic Experience, there is dancing before the temple of sound. The kings and queens of the Cotton Club trade eights with the rock stars of cantorial music’s golden age. Booker T and the MGs and Astor Piazolla inspire new visions of High Holy Day chants.

Joined by the last of the old-school cantors, Jack Mendelson, the group lays down Further Definitions of the Days of Awe, live explorations of cantorial music, jazz, Latin vibes, Afrobeat and soul. Innovative technique and rock-solid roots get feet tapping and spirits soaring. Just in time for the High Holy Days, the (Jewish) New Year and Yom Kippur, the album presents a positive, cross-cultural reimagination of repentance and catharsis.

Creating new settings for the midnight prayers of Selichot, the service that marks the beginning of the most holy time of the Jewish liturgical year, The Afro-Semitic Experience returns worship to its creative, vigorous roots. It celebrates the intersection of gospel spirit and the passion of hazzanut (an ancient Jewish style of cantorial singing). It finds powerful new points of contact with the divine.

“Prayer and study are a major tenet of all three Abrahamic faiths. That’s great, but to get there, worshippers often got rid of cathartic experience,” reflects group founder, bassist and composer David Chevan. “But we need the dancing at the temple, those ecstatic moments. That’s really where we’re coming from.”

~~~

For a musician like Chevan and group co-founder, composer, and keyboard wizard Warren Byrd, the links were clear between the most sacred of religious moments in cantorial masterpieces on old 78s and sounds of jazz, soul, and gospel. Listening to Mendelson, who grew up singing with some of hazzanut’s greats, Chevan felt the same contours and dynamics that he experienced as a seasoned jazz performer and as an occasional bassist in several of Brooklyn’s African-American churches.

“I was curious how I would accompany this music if I ever got a chance,” Chevan recalls. “I realized that The Afro-Semitic Experience could do it really wonderfully. We could color the settings the right way and make them interesting, while still bringing out the spiritual qualities.”

The group finds the sway of tango in a stately Selichot prayer (“Adoshem, Part I”) and Otis Redding-style soul in their setting of “Viddui”, a prayer that is an acrostic list of sins worshipers chant to seek atonement High-energy Latin beats (“Adoshem, Part 2”) transform fervent prayers, while slow-burning congas (“Shomer Israel”) and atmospheric trumpet and bowed bass (“Tivieynu”) perfectly support the deep expressiveness of cantorial music.

This moment—where poignant emotion and sonic prowess intertwine—unites Jewish and African American musical tradition. “I’d spent plenty of time as a child and young adult in the presence of the ululations of high praise in churches, seeing my sister, or my neighbor’s son or daughter “slain in the spirit” or speaking in tongues accompanied by Hammond organ, piano, drums, and clapping hands,” Byrd recounts. “The melismata of hazzanut is virtually congruent to the trills and swoops of gospel singing. Our group’s improvisational directive is as free as playing impromptu accompaniment for spontaneous songsters at the Sunday morning service.“

The group’s mix of spirit, complexity, and spontaneity impressed Cantor Jack Mendelson, who heard the group’s interpretation of several vintage cantorial performances. He began meeting with Chevan, singing him lines he had learned and honed over decades of training, davening, and teaching others—including his filmmaker son Daniel, who sings with him on several tracks.

Mendelson is one of the last in a long line of cantors that extends back to the Old World, men revered for their voices and followed them as avidly as any rock star today. Jacob Mendelson caught the tail end of an era when jazz icons would catch top cantors at services, and cantorial singers often savored shows by the great African-American vocalists.

Steeped in the improvisatorial savoir faire of cantorial tradition, Mendelson loved getting a chance to connect his art with jazz. “I can go crazy as long as I stay in the mode. You have to practice and have a good ear, like a jazz musician,” Mendelson explains. “I ask all of my cantorial students to listen to Ella Fitzgerald. When she sings a song, she sings around the song. It’s never the same thing twice...which is what a great cantor does.”

Yet vocal pyrotechnics are only part of the deep Afro-Semitic connection Mendelson and the group bring to light. “For me, hazzanus comes from a place of deep struggle and sadness beneath the surface. There’s a lot more going on emotionally once you tap into that,” notes Daniel Mendelson, who absorbed both his father’s and his opera singer mother’s art. “In a similar way, jazz comes from a place of the blues. To play the blues, you have to know why they need to be played. But it’s also finding joy through that struggle.”

In a small circle or a big house of worship-turned-dance-floor, The Afro-Semitic Experience brings people to this joy. “At a benefit show several years ago in a chapel at Yale, we got into a groove and all of a sudden, the other performers jumped up and started dancing together,” Chevan recalls. “There we were, in a church, with everyone dancing, looking at each other, and thinking wow. It’s all making sense.”

Not long after Katrina, Byrd recalls, “We found ourselves in Lafayette, Louisiana, for a gig at a synagogue. The turnout was small, and the sanctuary was deemed too big by our small contingent, so we moved to the rabbi’s study. At our slight nudge, the attendees formed a semi-circle around us. It was one of the best concerts we ever had.”

This esprit du corps rises from a communal approach to composition. Though Chevan often plays instigator, bringing food for thought to the group, members will craft the perfect horn line or add just the right percussive elements. When Mendelson insisted they work on a Hassidic kaddish together, at first “I didn’t feel it,” Chevan says. “Then I realized that the horn line needed to capture that almost rude boy ska flavor, as well as a klezmer vibe, and we figured the piece out. The neat thing is how much those sounds overlap. [Veteran percussionist] Baba Coleman really brings that to the piece.”

The commitment to group music making has turned the group’s message of cross-cultural connection into a big, dancing reality. “The best moments often come with audiences from different communities. We get to watch people getting into the moment, touched by what we’re doing,” reflects Chevan. “It’s amazing when communities do come together, and you see them listen to each other’s songs and start to dance, side by side. “

“In this music, there really is no room for narcissism,” Byrd muses. “The tuning in to my fellow musicians and the audience trumps any self-centeredness.”

Hillside Festival (July 22-24, 2011; www.hillsidefestival.com) runs ahead of the curve. They’ve booked band after indie band right before the group made it big. They focused on the environment—solar power, living roofs—long before green became everyone’s favorite color.

The Arcade Fire organized a mass sing-a-long and impromptu parade for their first Hillside appearance. Feist, Stars, and Broken Social Scene cut their teeth in its tents. Barenaked Ladies were so enamored with their Hillside experiences over the years that they helped the Festival build the permanent garden of plants that forms the Mainstage roof. Final Fantasy jammed with their folk idol Buffy St. Marie.

With its indie vibe, Hillside channels the cool college-town energy of nearby Guelph, Ontario, but lets artists and concert-goers cut loose from the everyday world. Held on an island in the middle of a reservoir and wooded nature preserve, there is no sign of urban development visible from the site. “The island,” explains artistic director and long-time Festival devotee Sam Baijal, “is the perfect symbol for the Festival. When you walk through those gates, you feel you are really getting away from it all.”

This refuge makes for open-minded audiences and for performers eager to hang out and have a good time. “Bands walk out on stage, and even though no one has ever heard of them, they’ll get an amazing response,” Baijal relates. “Our audiences come without preconceived notions. They’ll buy tickets before we’ve even announced our lineup. They want to be challenged.”

Challenges come during the festival’s workshops: unexpected pairings of artists tossed together on one stage for a madcap jam session. Though once upon a time, Hillside made these matches by pulling names out of a hat—they were even called “hat bands”—now programmers curate performers who would never have jammed otherwise. Twenty-two musicians joined reggae legend Burning Spear to chant down Babylon one year during the festival, while Calexico and members of Los Lobos rocked out together another time. “You can’t buy or plan that kind of spontaneity,” Baijal explains. “These things just happen here.”

Alongside the commitment to adventuresome music is an equally important commitment to the environment. Hillside has been recycling seriously since the ’80s and has used solar power to run events since the early ’90s. The festival has stopped allowing plastic bottles, bringing in water trucks, not only to avoid waste, but “because the festival feels water should be free to all,” Baijal notes. And you won’t find Styrofoam or plastic disposables on the island: Food is served on dishes that are washed by hundreds of volunteers.

Though hip, Hillside keeps it homegrown, right down to refusing all corporate sponsorship: You’re likely to catch seniors raving about how they loved the beatboxer they just heard, or see kids sliding through mud puddles. There is hand drumming, a First Nations circle, and spoken word performances. Festival fans practice yoga or get goofy citations from a self-appointed, tongue-in-cheek fashion policeman.

When The Persuasions, a cappella icons and fifty-year touring veterans, got out of the bus atop the Midnight Dome overlooking the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers, they broke into tears at the view. Under a midnight sun, while eagle-sized ravens soared overhead, the Persuasions looked down at a tiny town of gold rush-era buildings, where the 2,000 inhabitants of Dawson City waited eagerly for their arrival.

The remote Yukon town doubles in size for the festival each year, as visitors fly in on prop planes, drive down the Top of the World Highway, or canoe for ten days up the majestic, northward-flowing Yukon River. Upon arrival, the dirt streets grow dusty from the enthusiastic feet of musicians and audience members exploring the culture, architecture, and good spirits in this gold-rush town. Impromptu jam sessions spring up on all corners, lasting well past the festival’s 2 AM curfew; neither the world-class musicians nor the spirited audience members want to stop playing.

“For locals, it’s insane,” exclaims Tim Jones, festival producer. “Hordes of interesting and arty people descend on our sleepy gold mining town. For visitors, our small size (1200 tickets) creates an incredible intimacy. People get to know the volunteers and the locals. The musicians are everywhere – in the same bars and restaurants as the patrons. You feel a real personal involvement in the community that you‘d never feel at a huge commercial music fest.”

It started, like many Canadian festivals, with a little party—a private goat roast on the banks of the Yukon River, paying its visiting musicians with flakes of gold—that was too much fun to keep quiet about. It grew into a festival able to woo and wow major talent, both established and up-and-coming: Bruce Cockburn, Barenaked Ladies, Jane Siberry, and indie darling Basia Bulat. Bulat was so refreshed and inspired by her time in Dawson that she centered her latest album, Heart of My Own, on the experience.

Artists rarely leave without a story: hitching a five-hour ride on a Porta-Potty truck when their flight was overbooked or playing their way up the Yukon at tiny hamlets with just a gas station and a motel. And sometimes, they decide to stay for good.

“Performers sometimes drop everything and move here,” Jones notes, himself a recent and very willing transplant to the area. “One year, the Ontario alt-country band Jon-Rae and the River came. Right after the festival, they broke up and the singer moved to Dawson City. She got a job with the local First Nations band and organized a powwow the next summer.”

What draws and inspires people is Dawson City’s peculiar Northern spirit: a self-reliant egalitarianism and modest openness bred of a powerful place—grizzlies outnumber people by nearly 3-to-1 in the Yukon—and relative isolation.

The Yukon is a challenging place to keep a band going, with distance and difficult travel a part of life–but the Territory is still crawling with musicians, driven by a local culture built around supporting the arts and live music. In addition to big-name international artists, Dawson’s Festival showcases dedicated, creative musicians, from First Nations singer songwriters to local soul outfits. The Festival is especially fond of the esoteric: Whitehorse’s all-female metal band Carnal Romance take their lyrics from Harlequin novels and will roar and moan at this year’s festival.

At year-round live shows and at the festival itself, it’s not surprising to catch the town’s mayor between a mechanic from the gold mine and a hipster from Montreal in town for seasonal work. Grubby hardworking crews fresh from setting up the stage have been caught singing back-up with a sprightly children’s folk performer. People have been known to crowd surf to bluegrass.

“Dawson has the most enthusiastic and open-minded audience I’ve ever seen anywhere. They are thrilled to hear live music – since it’s so rare up here, after all - and want to hear something they’ve never heard before,” Jones explains. “You’ll have miners and seniors listening intently to a noisy new music ensemble [Bell Orchestre, 2008, featuring members of Arcade Fire] or an avant-jazz sax improviser from Harlem. They’re ready for anything.”

Plenty of outdoor summer festivals give music fans good times in the park. Some feature global sounds. But in sonic scope, community impact, and positive vibes, few rival London, Ontario’s admission-free TD Sunfest (July 7-10, 2011) Full festival info at http://www.sunfest.on.ca/.

Artists fly in from across the continent and overseas—just to perform at TD Sunfest. It’s a signature Canadian festival that has now outgrown its verdant, tree-lined home in Downtown London’s Victoria Park, drawing ever larger, strikingly multi-generational and multi-ethnic crowds during its four-day run (More than 200,000 visits last summer in a city with a population of just over 350,000).

In addition to its always rich panoply of roots, world, and jazz artists–many of them JUNO Award (Canadian Grammy) winners—this year’s TD Sunfest is highlighting the global edge of electronica through a new programming component entitled “Suntronica ‘11”. International heavy hitters—the South American psychedelia of Chicha Libre, the Afro-Colombian Technicolor hip hop of Systema Solar—meet Canadian favorites, such as Vancouver’s unlikely yet grooving Delhi 2 Dublin and Montreal’s Nu Afro-Latin big band, the Roberto Lopez Project. Artful jazz, raw roots, and dance floor beats mingle, just as immigrant grannies get down next to hipster teens.

“Our patrons relish the tremendous element of surprise, of sharing new discoveries,” explains TD Sunfest Executive & Artistic Director Alfredo Caxaj. “Every year we work hard to book both established and up-and-coming creative artists whom people haven’t seen live before; international and Canadian groups coming to the area for the very first time. Sunfesters always know there will be something spectacular on stage.”

Caxaj adds: “The most incredible thing about Sunfest is its unparalleled socio-cultural impact. We are the only event where the community, here in London and from across the region, comes together in a free and upbeat environment. That’s worth a hundred political initiatives, in our book.”

This unique environment stems not only from an eclectic music lineup—ranging from the Afro-Colombian body percussion and a cappella from NVOZ to the Kiwi alt-klezmer of Mamaku Project—but also from the hundreds of premier food, craft, and visual art exhibitors who turn Victoria Park into a huge international feast. With the sun as its inspiration, the heady mix of sounds, sights, and tastes draws tens of thousands of visitors from increasingly far afield—Middle Eastern music fans from Southeastern Michigan, festival devotees from Central Ohio. As one visitor told London’s local daily last summer, “Once you get a taste of Sunfest, you’re a fan for life”.

While putting London on the global music map, the festival is also helping to catapult the Forest City to the top tier of tourist destinations. In fact, the American Bus Association recently selected TD Sunfest one of the TOP 100 North American Events for 2011.

Such popularity and acclaim is already fuelling plans to move TD Sunfest outside its park hub and into the streets of downtown London. The expansion comes despite the dismal economic outlook confronting many arts organizations. If Caxaj and his colleagues have their way, “Canada’s Premier Celebration of World Cultures” will soon turn urban street corners into dancehalls, jazz clubs and jam sessions brimming with musical surprises.

There is a breed of performing arts venues that holds a special place in the American cultural landscape. Grand Performances (Los Angeles), Stern Grove Festival (San Francisco), and SummerStage (New York City) use unique public spaces to provide public access to both internationally renowned and eclectically daring performing arts. In a time of collapsing ticket sales, their diverse audiences are growing by leaps and bounds.

These free outdoor festivals have demonstrated for decades that the demand for quality arts programming is extremely high—and increasing. They have become a force in arts leadership, encouraging new approaches at ticketed venues, nurturing new generations of performers and arts lovers, and actively advocating for experimental, cross-genre artistic endeavors. They have shown that when the arts thrive, so does the community they serve.

The Power of Place

The physical spaces of these three festivals couldn’t be more different—a storied grove, a glittering urban plaza, a plethora of iconic parks. Yet all three create a powerful sense of place, and from that, a deep sense of community among audience members. Stern Grove, home to the eponymous festival for nearly 75 years, is a marvel of outdoor acoustics, a natural bowl surrounded by tall trees and frequented by hawks and butterflies. Grand Performances’ offerings unfold among over an acre of fountains and waterfalls, reflected in the steel and glass of downtown L.A. high rises. SummerStage shows offer a bounty of different New York views, from panoramas of the Manhattan skyline to the manicured meadows of Central Park, as well as historic neighborhoods where certain musical styles were born.

These public settings dedicated to performance foster an egalitarian, laidback vibe while still engendering deep respect and enjoyment of the arts, thanks to their high production values and thoughtful programming. The freedom to come and go, to use the space in various ways—picnicking, dancing, listening from a distance—gives patrons the liberty to create their own experience. This often translates into large friendly crowds, in which thousands dance together or sit in complete, rapt silence.

Open Access

Without walls or entry fees, the festivals create a come-as-you-are spirit that welcomes visitors from all walks of life, people who might not feel comfortable attending similar events at other venues. The festivals’ audience demographics speak to this: All three attract youthful and ethnically and economically diverse crowds that closely mirror the demographic profile of their communities.

Programs like Stern Grove Festival, SummerStage, and Grand Performances are often the first exposure young people have to orchestral performances, global music, or modern dance. Beyond mere education, the festivals are grooming the next generation of avid arts lovers and supporters, as the kids in strollers become the adult concertgoers (or the staff member, or the artist on stage). Audiences of all ages now expect quality and adventuresome performances.

Access turns spectators into tastemakers, allowing visitors to try something new and to form their own opinions. In turn, these opinions guide the festivals, creating a strong sense of community connection, thanks to everything from good old-fashioned audience surveys to asking the public to weigh in on potential performers on Facebook and Twitter.

SummerStage carefully matches performers to neighborhoods, presenting big names in their old stomping grounds (Big Daddy Kane in Brooklyn; salsero Eddie Palmieri in the South Bronx), and canvassing park visitors to find out what kind of music they love. Grand Performances cultivates strong ties to tastemakers in immigrant communities by partnering with key arts and cultural organizations, such as the Central American Resource Center (CARACEN), the Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles, and the Farhang Foundation, dedicated to Iranian-American heritage. Since its Depression-era inception, Stern Grove Festival has been a vital platform for San Francisco’s performing arts community, presenting the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera and San Francisco Ballet .

Big-Impact Eclecticism

Thanks to their admission-free status, Grand Performances, SummerStage, and Stern Grove Festival have the freedom to focus on emerging artists and experimental work with potentially broad appeal. They often put big names and up-and-coming performers on the same stage, and audiences trust that whatever’s on, it’s going to be good.

To engage a wide range of potential patrons, presenters will also make unexpected pairings of highly respected artists from different scenes who share similar sensibilities. SummerStage has booked New York hip-hop legend Afrika Bambaataa with young heir to Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat throne, Seun Kuti; or Brazilian singer-songwriter Seu Jorge with indie darling Jose Gonzalez. Grand Performances paired the lightning-fast Senegalese hip hop of Daara J with the old school hip hop-inspired grooves of the daKAH Hip Hop Orchestra. Stern Grove Festival had Indian tabla master Zakir Hussein play Hindustani classical repertoire and then jam with Tabla Beat Science, a project involving younger players and DJs. They presented veteran New Orleans R&B star Alain Toussaint with the brash and youthful Trombone Shorty.

Artist Springboards

Audience access and trust is also a boon for artist development, a vital aspect of all three festivals’ work. Grand Performances has offered L.A. performers everything from the boost of repeated engagements to the nuts and bolts of business advice and administrative support. SummerStage, run by musicians and veterans of the music industry, has forged similarly strong ties to artists in the burgeoning New York scene, commissioning and producing new dance and theater works start to finish. Stern Grove Festival was founded to provide stable opportunities for professional musicians and provides local artists with broader exposure alongside internationally-known acts.

With their open-minded audiences, the festivals frequently offer emerging or global artists something that would be hard to find anywhere else: access to a big, enthusiastic crowd ready for anything. Whether the performer is a just-breaking indie artist like MIA or The xx or established but lesser known icons like Salif Keita or Jimmy Scott, exposure to a festival audience can have a serious impact on artists’ careers.

Absorb, conquer, and rock. Louisiana’s Francophone communities have faced down exile and persecution, natural and manmade disaster, by remaining resolutely creative. Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys know this creativity intimately; what fiddler and co-leader David Greely eloquently calls “survivor joy.” It has echoed for centuries in everything from aching solo ballads to swamp pop blasts and funkified two-steps.

Their latest album, Grand Isle calls on this joy and shows its defiant, resilient forms in all their glory, with help from producer, friend, and swamp-n-roll legend CC Adcock. They toss aside roots-music formulas to channel the energy of an entire community of multi-ethnic, hard-hitting eccentrics and activists, from a mad musical inventor of New Orleans to a pensive professor-lyricist, from a vintage recording guru to a bold local staging an oil spill photo exhibit in her dining room.

“Cajuns possess the magic ingredient that is only produced by genuine suffering,” Greely explains. “Survivor joy can be found around the world, in the world's best music.”

This magic element has been in full force since the BP oil spill struck Louisiana’s coastal communities, which were still recovering from the double blows of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The outrage and the loss of a way of life loomed large in the Playboys’ minds as they worked on their first studio album in five years.

Accordionist and singer Steve Riley recalled walking through the dining room of a local woman determined to share the true nature of the disaster with the world by exhibiting devastating photos of local wildlife slick with deadly oil. He captured the spirit of these community efforts in a call for transformation on “C’est l’heure pour changer (This is the time for change).”

After the disaster, Greely shared a stage with local Creole singers, whose poignant call and response evoked the depth of his rage and sorrow. Songs like “C’est trop (It’s too much)” or “Grand Isle” seethe and mourn, portraying the beautiful spot on the coast where jumping dolphins and picnic tables piled high with seafood were replaced by clean-up crews and TV news cameras.

Yet at the heart of what the Playboys do lies joy; it's music for dancing, even when it's political, historical, or intellectual. It’s music that has kept a people together through thick and thin, from French village to Canadian settlement to American exile. “You can go to cemetery in Poitou, France where it all started and see the same names you find in the phone book here in Louisiana,” Greely remarks. “We started in the same village together, and despite all that effort, or maybe because of it, we’re still together.”

Though a constant unifying element for Cajuns, the sound of survivor joy is diverse and varied. With help from Adcock, who’s played with everyone from Bo Diddley to Buckwheat Zydeco, the Mamou Playboys pushed the sonic possibilities hard. Still inspired lyrically and melodically by Louisiana roots music—neglected gems on old 78s or old collections of Creole proverbs (“Pierre”)—the group found Cajun music in the most unexpected places: in Edith Piaf songs, in ska rockers, even in ’80s pop.

Adcock laughs when he describes how ’80s tunes fit beautifully with Louisiana beats. Adcock and childhood friend Riley would use the two-step skills they learned dancing to Cajun bands with their parents and woo girls at high school dances, to new wave hits. This connection inspired the band’s take on “Danser sans comprendre (Dancing Without Understanding).”

Other connections also yielded gold in the studio. “We were trying to find the right groove for ‘C’est l’heure,’” Riley remembers. “CC and I messed around in the studio a bit and got a really cool groove. It came out with this ska feel,” aptly reflecting Louisiana’s peculiar position on the northern fringe of the Caribbean. “It’s like some of our Cajun beats, but way more relaxed.”

Inspiration for one of the album’s striking covers, Edith Piaf’s “Je ne regrette rien,” came from music industry guru Seymour Stein, who signed Madonna, The Talking Heads, and the Ramones to Sire back in the day. After hearing the Playboys one night, he suggested they try a Piaf tune, a comment greeted skeptically by the band. That is, until they tried it out and discovered “It’s really just a great swamp pop tune,” Greely grins.

Then there’s "Chatterbox," a song penned by Mr. Quintron, a musician whose eccentricity stands out even in New Orleans: He’s invented wacky drum machines, a quirky stage persona, and launched clubs in the 9th Ward. But his earthy, grungy, funky musical sensibilities resonate with the Playboys on the track, about a wake for a Cajun gal who was a fixture on the New Orleans punk scene. Named for a cafe in Eunice, Louisiana, a town important to both Riley and Adcock’s families, it captures the meeting of hipster weird and old-school bayou that shapes the region’s music. All to a double-kick zydeco beat harkening back to the heyday of Clifton Chenier.

The frenetic diversity—what Adcock calls “a Cajun iPod on shuffle”—evokes a musical journey through the decades, using vintage equipment in studios across several states to get just the right sound. “Lyons Point,” a tribute to the self-reliant spirit of Riley’s wife’s hometown, uses period reverb equipment to create a sound reminiscent of the Cajun records of the 1930s. “It’s not pristine, I’ll tell you that,” Greely exclaims. “We’re talking about using tape, playing through tube equipment, singing into mics shaped like silver footballs, just the strangest thing you’ve ever seen.”

Along with unmistakable and unique sonic qualities, vintage recording approaches pushed the Playboys musically. “When you're using this kind of equipment, you're committed; you can't fix it later,” explains Greely.

“The Mamou Playboys don’t put out an album unless we have something to say,” Riley reflects, “unless we’re setting the bar higher. This record is designed to make people scratch their head and wonder, and to push the music forward.”

This is the story of why the brilliant Queen of Sheba shaved her legs, how the stunning Vashti laid down the line for her drunken husband, and how a mysterious witch spoke King Saul’s doom and then served him a nice dinner. The Naming, the upcoming release from singer and composer Galeet Dardashti, draws on the Persian classical music and Middle Eastern Jewish singing deep in her bones to transform the ghostly outlines of Biblical women into full-blown flesh-and-blood personalities.

The Naming’s release on September 14 occurs smack in between the Jewish High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah (September 9-10) and Yom Kippur (September 18). She is the first woman in her family to continue her family legacy of distinguished Persian and Jewish musicianship.

Leaping from passing mentions and phantom females, Dardashti seeks names and lives for the many women in the Bible, Talmud, and the Midrash, the millennia-old Hebrew commentaries. “I am not going to sugarcoat everything,” Dardashti explains. “We know that women get the short stick. Women are marginalized. I am trying to show how for the most part women try to overcome that inequity. And how they can rise to the challenge and be powerful and funny.”

Women like the Queen of Sheba (“Sheba”), whose interest in King Solomon blossomed into romance, but only after he had the brains to answer her riddles and only after she overcame one more obstacle. “In both Muslim and Jewish tradition, Sheba is a really cool character, a gorgeous queen who perhaps hailed from Ethiopia or Yemen. One of the stories repeated in both religious traditions says that just as they are about to make out, Solomon finds that her legs are really hairy, like a horse,” Dardashti laughs. “So, the commentaries say, he has her remove the hair before he is willing to sleep with her. It’s taking her down a notch. She’s not really a woman. She couldn’t be a woman and be that powerful and have such chutzpah and ask all those questions.”

Strong, powerful women—both Israelite and non-Jewish—are everywhere in the Bible, from the bold Persian Queen Vashti who refused her carousing husband’s orders to dance naked for his buddies (“Vashti”), to the witch of Endor, who foretold Saul’s bitter end but then showed him motherly kindness (“Endora”).

For Dardashti, these women’s stories intertwine with her own family’s tales of women breaking the rules: Just as the Biblical Michal donned the tallit (prayer shawl) and tefillin (leather prayer bands) only worn by men, so did Dardashti’s childless great-aunt Tovah in Tehran years ago, who reasoned that since she did not have children to care for, she should take on the same religious obligations as men and use the same accoutrements. Dardashti links their stories musically in “Michal,” singing the text recited while fastening the tefillin.

They also echo through her own story, and Dardashti’s personal transition into motherhood drew her to the intriguing female shadows flitting through Jewish tradition. “I don’t know if I would have done this project if I hadn’t been pregnant. I’d never written about gender or gone to women’s groups. But so much of what is mentioned about women in the Torah is about giving birth, or not giving birth and not being able to,” Dardashti reflects. “And suddenly, I was linked to those stories, that identity as a woman with a child.”

Binding texts in several languages from the Torah, Talmud, Midrash, and elsewhere, Dardashti crafts songs inspired by her heritage, the Persian classical music that her legendary grandfather Yona Dardashti performed in Iran, and the Persian Jewish liturgical tradition she learned from her father, Hazzan Farid Dardashti. The intertwined texts resonate with the sound of the Persian santur (hammered dulcimer) and Arabic qanun (zither), as well as in the Middle Eastern cantorial and Persian classical vocal techniques Dardashti employs to tell her stories. “In ‘Vashti,’ for example, I open with passages from the Book of Esther,” Dardashti explains. “I chant that in the Persian style,” the Hebrew liturgy sung the way it evolved among Iran’s Jews.

Though Dardashti grew up in the U.S., singing in a family band “sort of like the Partridge Family, but without the van,” she was separated from her grandfather’s world and her Persian heritage by language and custom. “At that point, I thought my grandfather’s music was beautiful, but it was definitely something foreign, different,” Dardashti recalls. “In Iran, my grandfather was huge. He was one of the biggest singers in his day. He would sing at the Shah’s palace, he had a weekly radio show, back when there was no TV, so everybody would listen every week. They knew he was Jewish,” Dardashti recounts. Yona Dardashti was so popular as a singer, in fact, that even when he acted as cantor at the synagogue in Tehran, Jews and Muslims would line up to hear him. Dardashti’s father carried on the family tradition with his own TV show, becoming a teen heartthrob before eventually leaving for the U.S. to attend college, and becoming a renowned cantor.

Only after she began research in Israel as a student, where Yona Dardashti and many other Persian Jews emigrated in the 1960s, did Dardashti come to a stirring realization. Her grandfather stopped performing locally after he established his new life in Israel. “The émigrés were less interested in keeping their Persian identity than in becoming Israeli, which was becoming more and more Western and less accepting of Middle Eastern culture. When I understood that, I was stunned.”

To reconnect with her roots, Dardashti set about learning classical singing from Persian Jewish musicians in Israel, including the elusive taqrir, a glottal ornament in the intro to “Michal” that at first confounded her then more Western-oriented voice. After weeks of frustrated attempts to emulate it, “My teacher mentioned that it was like crying. I remember that that really opened things up for me,” Dardashti muses. “Crying, but also laughing. It’s the sound of pure emotion,” a sound perfectly attuned to the bittersweet fates of Dardashti’s heroines.

While shedding light on the strong women of the Abrahamic religions, Dardashti also strives through her music to bring Middle Eastern Jewish traditions to wider audiences. “Most people don’t realize there was this shared culture or that there was such a thing as a Persian or Arab Jew. I am excited to share this music with people so that we can break these boundaries, these stereotypes of what Jewish is, what Iranian is,” Dardashti reflects. “It’s similar to what I am also trying to do in The Naming: breaking down walls about the characters I’m writing about.”

Most public schools facing the current funding crunch mount desperate donation drives or bake sales. But at the arts-based East Village Community School in the heart of one of New York’s historically bohemian and global neighborhoods, parents, students, and school staff opted instead to raise money by singing compelling ballads, making funky beats, and recalling unexpected family stories.

Fresh, savvy, and chock full of infectious songs and history, Songs from the East Village maps the world of childhood, as it spans the globe. Like the school and its neighborhood home, the album unites Iraqis and Tibetans, immigrants by choice and refugees, deep historical roots and edgy innovations.

Grammy Award-winning Irish vocalist Susan McKeown is among the accomplished musician parents at the school, and has led the project from brainstorm to production. The idea first came to McKeown under the tragic circumstances of the death of East Village Community School (EVCS) student Juliet Harper. During the memorial service, one of the school’s parents, flamenco singer and flautist Alfonso Mogaburo Cid, sang a heartbreaking lullaby learned from his mother.

“The song had the power to carry people through an event like that,” McKeown reflects. “It was overwhelming. It brought us all together.” It also sparked the realization that within the school community, there was a wealth of incredible musical talent and an opportunity to engage children in creating music.

The compilation that started as an extracurricular activity has developed into an exciting album, filled with world-renowned neighborhood talent as well as yet-unheard beautiful young voices. Behind each song is a story that is as much East Village as it is American, the tales of immigrants. And it is as much American as it is universal. These melodies of childhood playgrounds and imaginations express shared experiences of play, loss, and longing.

McKeown helped organize a “CD Club,” an optional group for students of different ages, with the end result being a professionally produced album. Wanting to draw on the rich cultural heritage of the families in the school, the club solicited songs from parents and staff, asking for children’s songs from their own childhood that could be included in the project. With each song came incredible stories that illustrate the web of experiences that brought people to the Lower East Side of New York.

The East Village has long been a multicultural bohemian space, rich in sounds, sights, and smells from around the globe. It’s also home to an extraordinary group of talented musicians, actors, writers, and artists—many of whom send their kids to the arts-based East Village Community School, and lend their striking voices and ideas to the album.

Ray Santiago, a Puerto Rican pianist who has been a staple in the East Village Salsa scene for decades, is featured on “Arroz Con Leche,” a Puerto Rican playground song. Bassist and Black rock icon Melvin Gibbs lays down the Afro-funk grooves he’s perfected in “The Tiger.” This track also features the words of actress Sarita Choudhury, who starred in films like A Perfect Murder, Mississippi Masala, and Spike Lee’s She Hate Me. “The Tiger” weaves a sonic forest around Choudhury’s tale of a trip to Rajastan where she comes face-to-face with the fearsome, stunning predator during the making of a documentary.

Two Iraqi girls, forced by war to stay inside their Baghdad home for two years brought in a playground song that dates from the 1920s, “Belly a Belbool.” Belbool was a Jewish Iraqi swimming instructor, who would teach his students rhythmic strokes in the Tigris River, to the beat of the song. It is still sung by girls in Baghdad playgrounds.

“Snow” is a Tibetan song performed a cappella, by a Tibetan fifth grader in his first year at EVCS. The boy and his younger brother, who arrived just a year ago, walked through the snow-covered Himalayas to India, before settling in their East Village home, among other refugee families. The emotion of that experience seers their voices.

More commonly known songs like Irish tune “Molly Malone” and the classic Americana song, “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” are given a fresh take with this interplay of different voices—big and small—and the children’s character that shines in each. The British song, “Soldier, Soldier” was brought by a mother who sang with her sister in their Northern England childhood. Her EVCS daughter added a verse where the maid takes her revenge on the soldier’s ungentlemanly behavior—a 21st-century twist to an old tune.

The album also captures a new generation, embracing traditions from the old. “Echi Bu Uka Amaka” is a Nigerian song that an EVCS parent learned from her father in their New York City apartment. Similarly, an African American family brought “Hambone,” which the father had sung in his grandparents’ house. These recordings are among the up-tempo highlights of the album.

“Every voice gets heard, like a camera focused on each child,” McKeown explains. “In this you get a great sense of how much is communicated in someone’s voice.”

Songs from the East Village will do more than document and celebrate these voices; it will keep them singing, both by encouraging musical performance at school and by raising money for the special arts-focused programs that make the EVCS such a jewel in the community.

For seven years globalFEST (www.globalfest-ny.org) has been the springboard festival for world music artists on the brink of North American national main stage success, performers known in one community but ready to cross into others, and the marquee stars of tomorrow. globalFEST 2010 showcases French Gypsy jazz with breakbeats, cumbia-fied downtempo Argentine club sounds, soul-stirring Colombian roots, new generation Louisiana fiddling, Africa unplugged, Irish traditional song, Senegalese roots reggae, Central Asian avant rock, Romanian hybrid blues, New York salsa upstarts, and a Gwo-ka master from Guadeloupe all under one roof at New York City’s Webster Hall (125 E. 11th St.) on January 10, 2010 at 7pm. The 2010 festival includes four U.S. debut performances and another NYC debut.

Tickets are $40 (www.ticketmaster.com or by phone through World Music Institute box office: 212-545-7536*). Buy tickets early, as prior globalFEST shows have sold out in advance.

globalFEST offers different musical styles to suit the variety of people attracted to the event. Traditional music enthusiasts will find appeal in Nightlosers, Cara Dillon, Cedric Watson, La Cumbiamba eNeyé, and La Excelencia. Rock and electronic aficionados will be attracted to Caravan Palace, Namgar, and Federico Aubele. Lovers of singer-songwriters will fast become fans of Alif Naaba and Meta and the Cornerstones. The French gateway continues to play an important role in bridging global artists to American stages giving France strong representation on globalFEST’s stages including Nguyên Lê’s Saiyuki and singer-percussionist François Ladrezo.

The festival—which has presented over 75 artists since its inception in 2004—is buoyed by a renewed sense of the United States’ place at the global table in the wake of Barack Obama’s election to president, confirmed by his recent Nobel Peace Prize. “This year’s globalFEST looks towards a new sense of internationalism and accessibility,” says Isabel Soffer of World Music Institute, who along with Bill Bragin of Acidophilus: Live and Active Cultures and Shanta Thake of Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater, direct the annual festival. “The U.S. is being re-embraced by the world,” says Bragin. “There is a reinvigorated interest in artists trying to connect with the U.S. market.”

As always, the three festival directors seek out artists that may be discoveries or even revelations for their audience, a mix of music fans, and performing arts professionals—including concert presenters, agents, managers, artists, labels, and press—on the lookout for new talent. “We continue to bring several local U.S. based bands as well as international ones, some smaller bands that may be easier to tour in clubs and cabarets, and other larger groups for major festival markets,” Thake explains.

Webster Hall’s three performance spaces mimic the spectrum of venues that concertpresenters use nationwide: a large main stage with balcony, a medium café-style space, and a bar with a packed, standing-room-only dance floor. This environment leads to an unusual night of musical madness.

“Global citizenry continues to be a priority for many nations and particularly France, and what better way to raise awareness of each other’s cultures than through music?” says Emmanuel Morlet, Musical Attaché at the French Embassy, the festival’s founding sponsor. “From increasing understanding to the real economic role the festival plays for emerging French and Francophone performers, now more than ever globalFEST plays a great role in connecting people across political boundaries.”

globalFEST finds the balance between pragmatism and idealism. “Each year we build on previous years’ successes by bringing artists from North America and abroad that we think have the strong potential for viable tours. But we never lose sight that these are representatives of the incredible cultural riches of the world that will likely influence people in ways we can’t even predict,” concludes Thake.

globalFEST is a volunteer-run co-production of World Music Institute, Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater, and Acidophilus: Live & Active Cultures. Support for all seven editions has been provided by The Cultural Services of the French Embassy with additional support from the French Music Export Office, recognizing France’s pre-eminent role as a hotbed of global music activity. The globalFEST media sponsor is WNYC Radio. globalFEST is presented in association with Bowery Presents. Visa services are provided courtesy of Tamizdat. Publicity services are provided by rock paper scissors, inc. François Ladrezo & Alka Omeka are presented in association with the Anyway Organisation. Nightlosers are presented in association with the Romanian Cultural Institute.

Tickets are $40 (www.ticketmaster.com or by phone through World Music Institute box office: 212-545-7536*). Buy tickets early, as prior globalFEST shows have sold out in advance.

Note that the artist line-up is subject to change. Souad Massi will not be performing due to scheduling conflicts.

* Tickets remain $35 for WMI Friends, Public Theater Patrons, and APAP members by calling the WMI box office: 212-545-7536. Tickets can be purchased with no service charges, cash only, at the Mercury Lounge 217 East Houston Street, Manhattan, Mondays – Saturdays, 12 noon – 7pm.

http://www.worldmusicwire.com/Imagine the farthest reaching global talent show ever, but one where all the contestants are kids who grew up scavenging and struggling in some of the planet’s poorest communities. Instead of picking through rags, they’re picking out ragas at ashrams following the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. Instead of scrounging for their next meal in the streets of Granada, Nicaragua, they’re scouring their imaginations for the perfect lyrics.

But this isn’t some fanciful remake of Slumdog Millionaire; it’s for real and its spirit resounds on Global Lingo, which unites the youthful world talent cultivated by Project Ahimsa, its musician friends—Michael Franti, Funkadesi, Sly & Robbie to name a few—and its NGO partners around the globe whose dozens of programs have transformed children’s lives through music. And in this talent show called life the kids are not competing for prizes, they are going against all odds for their very survival.

Project Ahimsa, founded as a nonviolent response to post 9.11 hate-crimes in America, raises funds the fun way—via star-studded benefit performances as well as outreach to committed philanthropists. These resources soon become microgrants of a few thousand dollars each that support a music teacher or instrument purchase by local non-profits from Thailand to Tanzania, often working with kids who’ve spent more time in the school of hard knocks than in a classroom. So far the organization has created 70 grants in fourteen countries serving 10,000 kids.

“When we started Project Ahimsa, we wanted to focus on cross-cultural understanding through music,” explains Project Ahimsa co-founder and album executive producer Vijay Chattha. “Out of all the things kids need, why music? It instills discipline, builds confidence and increases communication between kids, family, and the greater world, all tools for success no matter where you’re from,” notes Robin Sukhadia, who was so moved by his first contact with the organization’s work on a trip to India that he eventually became Project Ahimsa’s international grants program director “Music is very calming, especially for kids coming in from the streets. It’s one of the few ways they have to express themselves in a nonviolent way.

"It’s cool: at the benefit shows we put on here in the States, the artists range from the Black Eyed Peas to Karsh Kale. These artists play to raise money for the next generation of underserved artists. It’s a circle of support,” Chattha smiles.

Sukhadia got to see this transformation in action when he arrived, purely by chance, at Madav Sadhna, an NGO based at the Gandhi ashram in Ahmedabad, India, right as a check from Project Ahimsa, an organization he had never heard of at the time. After Madav Sadhna’s staff asked for help setting up a music program from Sukhadia, he canvassed the local street kids and their families to try and figure out what they needed.

“I spent next three weeks visiting schools, talking to kids, finding out what instruments they had and what teachers were around, instead of just buying instruments that might not have fit their needs,” Sukhadia recalls. “We determined that music was incredibly lacking. In most cases, public schools in the area had no music instruments, and if they did, they were locked up in cabinet and not accessible to kids. But the kids were hungry for music and loved singing and drumming.”

The kids so inspired Sukhadia (a tabla-player himself known as Tablapusher) and musical colleague JBoogie that they sampled the children’s voices to power tracks like “Speak it.” “Artists use samples all the time,” muses Chattha, “but how often to they go to the slums of India to get them?”

The kids, whether sampled or performing their own originals, steal the Global Lingo show and prove that music can do more than soothe or educate street-frazzled youth; it can completely turn their lives around.

Ganesh Barriya, featured on “Liberation 3000” and “He Manov Visvaas,” was a former rag picker from the desperately poor Ahmedabad slums who at fourteen had never gotten a crack at an education. He came to Madav Sadhna hoping to get training in crafts that would better feed his struggling family and give him a chance to learn.

Instead, he discovered a voice that charmed his community and changed his life forever: Ganesh began to earn money from his newly learned crafts and his gorgeous voice while still attending school full time, with the support of his parents. “I got to visit him at his home, and it was really powerful and humbling,” Sukhadia reflects. “He lives off the side of one of the busiest highways in a small tin shack with his five brothers and his parents. His parents are so proud of him. His street kid friends who still pick rags look up to him. Every day is difficult; they don’t have electricity or running water. But his involvement in this CD is a big step forward,” toward a musical apprenticeship with a master performer and a brighter future as a professional musician.

"When we presented Ganesh's vocals to DJ Chang, he was able to lay the groundwork for Krishna Kanaya (dj Chang's Indian Bass Remix)— pulling together something amazing in about two months,” says Project Ahimsa Director and Global Lingo co-Producer James Kuzin. “As word spread, Chang’s efforts generated interest among established artist-producers like Cubanix (He Manav Visvaas - Cubanix Inspiration Mix) and Amit Shoham (Boda Nathu), while inspiring the work of fast rising talents such as Nilla Green who composed Liberation 3000."

The young, striking Coco Peila (“Any Day Now”) hails from a world away, the rough neighborhoods of Oakland, California, but made a similar self discovery thanks to help from Youth Movement Records, a youth-driven music non-profit that uses a recording label as its model to teach kids how to make music and run a business. Peila’s nimble voice and thoughtful lyrics—and a little help from a swelling internet fan base—have opened unthinkable doors: “She went from Youth Music Records to studying music full time in Florida to get her Bachelor’s in Recording Arts. She really wants to make a career out of this,” Chattha beams.

The cycle of support encouraged by Project Ahimsa’s endeavors comes full circle on Global Lingo, an album that’s part tribute to these kids’ stunning accomplishments and part benefit for others like them still waiting to be touched by music. “Basically we wanted to find a way to connect these children and their stories and music from all around the world into one experience,” Chattha explains. “It’s a progress report on what we’ve been doing these past seven years. So we got artists who had performed at our events together with the children in the programs we fund. The kids want to learn and get involved, and they wanted to record.”

To turn diverse sounds into a single sonic experience, Chattha turned to Project Ahimsa’s friends, DJs and electronic music gurus like DK Bollygirl and dimmSummer, to bring the tracks together into one DJ set that flows from funky Afrobeat (Rocky Dawuni’s “Africa for Learn”) to Punjabi reggae (Funkadesi’s “Dolare”).

“Our main goal in the end,” Chattha reflects, “was just to demonstrate what these kids can do if they have an opportunity. That people from around the world can make something connected on a universal theme: music itself.” Sukhadia adds, “Music can heal and connect communities. We all just need to understand one another. Global Lingo proves it can happen through music.”